ree reference to poor Briss? She quite
repudiated poor Briss. She knew nothing at all about him, and the whole
airy structure I had erected with his aid might have crumbled at the
touch she thus administered if its solidity had depended only on that. I
had a minute of surprise which, had it lasted another minute as surprise
pure and simple, might almost as quickly have turned to something like
chagrin. Fortunately it turned instead into something even more like
enthusiasm than anything I had yet felt. The stroke _was_ extraordinary,
but extraordinary for its nobleness. I quickly saw in it, from the
moment I had got my point of view, more fine things than ever. I saw for
instance that, magnificently, she wished not to incriminate him. All
that had passed between us had passed in silence, but it was a different
matter for what might pass in sound. We looked at each other therefore
with a strained smile over any question of identities. It was as if it
had been one thing--to her confused, relaxed intensity--to give herself
up to me, but quite another thing to give up somebody else.

And yet, superficially arrested as I was for the time, I directly
afterwards recognised in this instinctive discrimination--the last, the
expiring struggle of her native lucidity--a supremely convincing bit of
evidence. It was still more convincing than if she had done any of the
common things--stammered, changed colour, shown an apprehension of what
the person named might have said to me. She had had it from me that he
and I had talked about her, but there was nothing that she accepted the
idea of his having been able to say. I saw--still more than this--that
there was nothing to my purpose (since my purpose was to understand)
that she would have had, as matters stood, coherence enough to impute to
him. It was extremely curious to me to divine, just here, that she
hadn't a glimmering of the real logic of Brissenden's happy effect on
her nerves. It was the effect, as coming from him, that a beautiful
delicacy forbade her as yet to give me her word for; and she was
certainly herself in the stage of regarding it as an anomaly. Why, on
the contrary, I might have wondered, shouldn't she have jumped at the
chance, at the comfort, of seeing a preference trivial enough to be
"worked" imputed to her? Why shouldn't she have been positively pleased
that people might helpfully couple her name with that of the wrong man?
Why, in short, in the language that G